New AdWords Feature Lets You Target Ads By Email Address

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Over the weekend, Google announced a powerful new feature in AdWords that will allow advertisers to target their audience unlike ever before. Through Customer Match, a new feature rolling out in the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to target ads by email address.

After you upload a list of email addresses, Customer Match will pair them with the corresponding Google users who you can target ads to. Advertisers can also target ads to similar audiences who share similarities with the individuals in the email list.

Customer Match is capable of targeting ads to anyone signed-in to Google on Gmail, Search, and YouTube.

With the audience sets generated by Customer Match, you can craft ads specifically build around reaching them, such as in the example provided by Google:

“Let’s say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York.”

There are still no details about any security measures in place to protect customer email addresses uploaded to Customer Match, other than stating the process is conducted in a “secure and privacy-safe way.”

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Mobile CPC Growth Is Up Despite Losses Elsewhere

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While display cost-per-click (CPC) growth is steadily falling, Adobe’s new Digital Advertising Report shows the opposite is happening on smartphones.

Using aggregated, anonymized data gathered over the past three years, Adobe assessed over 489 billion digital ad impressions. According to the data, click-through-rate (CTR) growth is consistently rising, but CPC growth how hit a steep decline over the past year, especially between Q4 and Q1.  At this point, there is a 33-point gap between CTR growth and CPC growth, despite the two being nearly equal at this time last year.

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However, smartphones seem to be bucking the trend. Mobile CPC growth is up 16 percent while CTR shows a 9 percent decrease year-over-year, leading to a 25-point gap. Adobe’s team believes the so-called “mobilegeddon” is largely responsible for the spike in mobile paid search.

The team also said price is another favor facilitating the increase in CPC growth on smartphones. According to Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe Digital Index, clicks on mobile are cheaper than desktop clicks, but the trend is unlikely to stick around.

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“Mobile advertising’s lack of perceived value causes a mobile search click to be worth 37 percent less than a desktop search click,” she says. “Conservative and incremental approaches to tackle ‘mobile stress’ are insufficient to bridge the gap. Disruptive and innovative changes will be required in order to drive future business success on both the publisher and marketer side.”

Facebook also saw a 23 percent increase in clicks, despite showing half the impressions year-over-year. The social platform’s CPC has largely stayed stagnant, but CTR growth has shot up 99 percent YoY.

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Adobe says Facebook’s huge increase is the result of improved targeting on the platform, with 51 percent of U.S. consumers saying they believe Facebook ads are genuinely of interest, compared to just 17 percent of consumers on YouTube. Gaffney also said Facebook has decreased the overall number of ads it shows users to create a better balance for users on mobile screens.

“[Google is] starting to lose ground as a marketing vehicle and part of the reason why is because they aren’t getting as many clicks out of global display ads,” Gaffney says.

Google has dominated the search market for years, but the latest findings show they are slowly losing ground. Google still holds 65 percent of the global search spend share, and 61 percent in North America, but Yahoo and Bing’s combined efforts is gradually rising 4 percent year-over-year.

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Google Unveils Highly Anticipated ‘Buy’ Button

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 AdWords In Store Visits

Today, Google announced their highly anticipated ‘Buy’ button with the unveiling of the new “Purchases on Google” feature, along with several other big upgrades.

Select retailers running mobile ads can now choose to include a ‘Buy on Google’ option that takes shoppers to a branded product page hosted by Google. From there, shoppers can finalize their purchase and save purchasing information for future use if you choose.

According to Google, this feature is only in the experimental early stages and is being limited to a small number of retailers.

Retailers who choose to use Purchases on Google will only have to pay for clicks on the shopping ads to the product page. They will also have the option to invite customers to join their mailing list during the transaction.

While Google will take responsibility for hosting product pages and providing security throughout the sale, it will be up to retailers to provide customer communication.

Along with the announcement of Purchases on Google, the company introduced a few more new features for AdWords:

  • Swipe to Reveal: When a user swipes on a Google ad carousel will show more information about the products, including price and availability.
  • Ratings and Reviews: Shopping ads with product ratings and reviews will now be shown if searchers use specific trigger words, such as “best”, ”reviews”, “recommendations”, etc.
  • Priority for Local Inventory Ads: LIA’s will now receive priority for local intent shopping queries.
  • App Deep-Linking: Ads from select retailers will now include links to view a product on their app.Today, Google announced their highly anticipated ‘Buy’ button with the unveiling of the new “Purchases on Google” feature, along with several other big upgrades.
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Bing Ads Expands Demographic Data To Improve Ad Targeting

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Bing Ads is improving its age and gender targeting by collecting more robust demographic data from users to help advertisers better target consumers.

According to the company’s blog, Bing’s global coverage of demographic data has recently doubled, which the company says will ensure its new targeting capabilities will provide “an increase in click-through rate and conversion rate for targetable users, thus potentially increasing the overall return on investment for all your campaigns.”

Advertisers can now utilize Bing’s new increased targeting features by setting targeting rules in “Advanced Targeting” within their Bing Ads dashboard. From there, they can segment audiences by age range, gender, device, and time, which will cause an automatic lift in bids when targeted audiences are searching.

Along with the announcement, Bing Ads released comScore data on its current audience, showing Bing Ads audiences tend to be more female and are most likely within the age range of 35-44.

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Google Makes Changes To Reduce “Fat Finger” Ad Clicks

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Tell me if this has ever happened to you. As you’re browsing a website, your thumb accidentally hits an ad as you try to scroll past it, launching a new page. You close it out, and try to scroll down again only to accidentally tap the ad on the page yet again, leaving you in a loop of trying to close the page and move past it but repeatedly wind up tapping an ill-placed ad that you have no interest in.

Not only is this scenario a bad experience for the user, but it is also a nightmare for advertisers who are wasting money on valueless clicks.

This has been a growing issue for the online advertising industry as mobile browsing increases, but sites have struggled to optimize their sites (and their advertising) for mobile viewers and errant taps. Now, Google is finally making changes to hopefully solve the so-called “fat finger” ad clicks problem.

  1. First, taps close to the edge of an image ad won’t be considered clicks. Google says it has identified the border area particularly prone to accidental clicks during scrolling.
  2. Second, for in-app install ads interstitial ads like the one on the right above users won’t be able to click on the app icon because the close button is overlayed on that image. Users will need to click the call-to-action button.
  3. Finally, ads will only become clickable after they’ve been onscreen for “a short period of time”. How long that period actually is isn’t clear, but Google says the delay is to give users “enough time to examine the content of an ad”.

While most of these changes are relatively common sense (why on earth was the app icon ever considered a click?), but they are still welcomed by the advertising community who have been complaining about “fat fingers” since display ads came to mobile.

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Bing Continues To Serve Yahoo Ad Click Volume After New Agreement

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Bing is swinging back at critics with new data that shows Bing Ads is successfully serving Yahoo search ad click volume.

According to a new Bing Ads blog post, Bing Ads delivered ad clicks against more than 99 percent of Yahoo desktop traffic and approximately 90 percent of traffic from mobile devices over the last month. The click volume continues to average 99 percent of Yahoo’s April baseline click volume as well.

The post also says that a 1 percent deviation month-over-month is a normal reflection of seasonal queries.

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In April, Yahoo and Microsoft renegotiated their search partnership after six years, which led to rumors that Bing Ads would not be successfully serving Yahoo search ad click volume, but the data disputes those claims.

Under the old deal, Bing Ads delivered all the desktop search ads across Yahoo properties, but the new deal allows Yahoo to serve up to 49 percent of that traffic from its own Gemini ad system. Additionally, both companies can now sell their own ads, which previously only Yahoo could do.

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Google Adds Guide To AdWords and Update Timeline

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googleadwordsGoogle AdWords is one of the most powerful tools available to companies trying to get their ads seen online. The only problem is the service can often feel overwhelming to those who are not experienced with the tool, especially with the near constant updates.

Thankfully Google is making it easier for business owners and advertisers to keep up to date and learn the ropes of AdWords with a super useful how-to-guide to paid search.

The guide is part of the Google Best Practice series, located in the Help section of AdWords. The series provides practical advice on using AdWords products to get the most out of paid search and covers everything from optimizing keywords to measuring analytics data.

To help keep up with the frequent updates, AdWords has also added a timeline tool which displays new features and changes to policy and guidelines in a convenient location. The timeline shows recent updates chronologically, so you can easily see what the latest news is.  The tool will show brief descriptions of all new products, features, and updates, with links to more information.

Considering AdWords updates hundreds of times a year, this timeline will be a godsend to many advertisers who are vigilantly watching for updates.

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Google Shows How They Fought ‘Bad Ads’ In 2014

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Online ads on Google’s AdWords network are a great way to reach a larger audience interested in your services, but breaking the rules can have harsh consequences. Google removed over 524 million “bad ads” from its ad network last year, and 214,000 of those advertisers are entirely banned from the service due to their bad behavior according to a recent announcement from Google.

“While this represents a tiny fraction of the total ads on our platform — the vast majority of advertisers follow our policies and act responsibly — we continue to remain vigilant to protect users against bad advertising practices,” Vikaram Gupta, director of ads engineering at Google, wrote Tuesday in the post.

The latest data shows several improvements from past years, such as a distinct drop in banned advertises for promoting counterfeit goods, but Google says it is a “constantly evolving fight” and the war against bad ads is far from over.

The announcement highlighted several of the “bad ads” trends that dominated 2014, including more than 43 million ads trying to trick users into clicking, over 4.3 million ads containing copyright infringement issues, and over 9.6 million ads containing healthcare-related violations.

The following infographic breaks down Google’s efforts to weed out bad advertising last year:

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Search Ad Spending For Mobile Will Bypass Desktop Spending in 2015

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A report released late last week finds that, beginning in 2015, just over half (50.1 percent) of spending on paid search ads will go towards mobile ads. The findings come from research firm eMarketer, who also predicts the trend to continue until mobile claims 76.7 percent of US search ad spend in 2018.

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These findings show the swift and clearly defined shift in ad spend, as less than a quarter (24.7 percent) of search spending went to mobile only last year.

The report says the change is the result of “the ubiquity of smartphones, and consumers’ growing use of phones in almost every waking moment of the day,” which in itself “means that search will be more mobile than desktop next year.”

While more spending is going to mobile, ROI is not quite following. The report does predict mobile ROI will continue to improve, but it will continue to trail desktop ROI until tracking and analysis becomes more precise and marketers can further refine their efforts.

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More Ad Conversions are Happening on Mobile According to New Report

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As Google rolls out more mobile ad formats and targeting measures for marketers, the customers seeing the ads appear to be more readily engaging advertisements from their smartphones and tablets.

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A new study from Marin Software shows that consumers are starting to use mobile ads to complete purchases, but desktop is still the dominant platform for conversions. Other interesting facts from Q3 of 2014 included in Marin’s report are:

  • Mobile devices comprised 31% of paid search impressions and 38% of search ad clicks on Google.
  • Mobile accounted for 30% of ad conversions with mobile conversions increasing 2.4% quarter-over-quarter and nearly 11% year-over-year.

Facebook:

  • 1 out of every 3 ad conversions on Facebook took place on a mobile device with mobile ad conversions increasing 16% quarter-over-quarter.
  • Mobile ads on Facebook accounted for 52% of ad impressions and 63% of clicks.

The findings also make it clear that Search ads are performing miles better than Display or Social ads. More-so, while smartphones may not be the most prominent medium for conversions, they consistently gain the highest rate of clicks.

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Marin says the large difference between Search CTE and Social or Display CTR can be attributed to intent. Searchers tend to be actively looking for something, meaning ads will be more tightly focused. On the other hand, those on social sites or Display ads which appear while users are already engaged with something else are less attention getting.

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